mdtinney's Movie Review of The Wolfman (2010)

Stylish yet cheesy remake!
mdtinney - wrote on 07/20/10

The Wolfman brings back Universal's classic horror-icon back now more amped up that before. The A-list cast consisting of Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving give a strong back bone to what is essentially a very entertaining movie. Stylistically the film achieves its own interesting atmosphere with the dark late 19th century look and the psychedelic mind effects. At times the more psychedelic moments do seem to cross the point of unintentional hilarity but the effort is still quite good.
Looking from the view-point of horror films The Wolfman is very weak on suspense. The movie resorts to making the audience jump with sudden, loud audio-bursts and with the unexpected appearance of people, animals etc. This is a very cheap method and I felt it crossed to the point of preposterous from time to time. There is of course some blood and gore but due to its over-the-top nature serves more as a visceral fuel for the film's actions and not really as an element of horror. However, the werewolf effects have been achieved extremely well. The film balances nicely between actual physical human-performance and CGI use. Because the film clearly attempted to stick true to the classic image of the Wolfman, the werewolves with their hunched look may occasionally remind you of the 1970s Hulk-series, but at least they look decidedly different from most other werewolves that have been seen in recent films. Sadly, as I have not seen the original Wolfman films I can't really measure how well this remake did justice to them. The script is okay, meaning the talented cast of actors actually get to show off some *acting* ability and not just move their jaws to meaningless words like in so many other contemporary horror-films. The heavy CG use is something I'll probably never get used to and there was even some redundant usage of it in this film but generally I can see why the film-makers would want to make the film-making process a bit easier with it. The Wolfman is thankfully a thoroughly entertaining movie even though it has its few weak spots. It's not, in my view, a true horror-film by definition but more of a supernatural, romantic action-film.